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Memory eating drive space
PowerMac G5/Dual
O.S. 10.4.11
FCE HD 3.5.1Seven-year old PowerMac purchased used with 10 partitions.
Primary partition with FCE on it has very little room.
I’m converting timelines to large, 1440×1080 files that are
being sent to an external, USB drive with lots of room.
Yet I constantly get a general error when it refuses to
compete the conversion, and warnings that the start-up
disk for this partition is almost full and needs to be cleared.I have removed virtually all non-essential files but the
conversion process uses space on the partition. Why?
I start with slightly less than 2gb remaining in the
partition, but by the time I get through 2 of 5 large HD
files to be converted, much of that space is gone.
Where is that space being allocated to on my system? -
5 Replies
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The system partition puts a lot of temporary “stuff” in virtual RAM, so if the partition is short of space, it literally runs out of room during these larger calculations. i don;t suppose you can get rid of some partitions and re-allocate more space? the OS and FCP run smoother when about 25% to 15% of the space is kept free for these temp files.
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First, thanks for quick response!
All of my media is stored on external drives – Firewire
and USB – so the internal, PowerMac partitions are NOT
being cluttered with captured video files.I have had issues in the past with trying to “transfer”
the Final Cut Express app to other partitions.
Sometimes it still lacks other components, I think,
to function fully like it did on the original partition
that also serves as the boot drive.Is there just no way to locate and delete
that RAM “stuff?” -
You can change the the amount of virtual RAM space allocated, as a preference, I think, but personally, I’d make that number higher, not lower, to improve performance, only you just don’t seem to have the space for it. So, why all the partitions, anyway? Need them?
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The partitions arrived with the PowerMac. I assume the original owner didn’t like the costs back then (2005?) for external hard drives, so he chose to partition-the-heck out of it to avoid O.S./application/media conflicts and poor performance.
I’ve always been leery of attempting to merge some or all of them because I don’t know how, don’t know if I can do it merely with Disk Utility, and I am afraid to mess with at least one of the three partitions which serve as start-up disks for the computer. Though I have been researching today about how to do it. Plus I think I have room to add memory modules.
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[Dunwoody Lampton] “I’ve always been leery of attempting to merge some or all of them because I don’t know how, don’t know if I can do it merely with Disk Utility, and I am afraid to mess with at least one of the three partitions which serve as start-up disks for the computer. “
You should be able to buy an external drive the same size or bigger than your internal drive and copy the contents of all of the partitions to it (into one big partition). Then restart your Mac and boot from this external drive (hold down the ‘Option’ key while you boot) to prove to yourself that it worked. If it works, you can repartition your internal hard drive into a single partition and copy all of the files back. Then you’ll have a single partition and can share all of the extra space on all of the older partitions. Use a tool like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do the copies or just drag and drop the highest level folders onto the other drive. You cannot use Disk Utility because it will not merge the contents of folders. You want to be sure that you merge any common folders.
Of course, you might just want to buy a larger internal drive and copy all the partitions to that to be guaranteed the extra space. Either way the external drive now serves as an emergency full disk backup of your system.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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